08.05.2023 | Artwashing Leipzig - Open Letter: Why is Palantir sponsoring the Dimensions art exhibition in Leipzig?
The bbk berlin informs about the open letter of artists from Leipzig who criticise the exhibition project "Dimensions" in the Pittlerwerke in Leipzig. Please sign the letter and support the Leipzig artists:
"Palantir is a US-based data analytics company whose business model seems to be the pushing and exceeding of any ethical and legal boundaries that stand in the way of a fully “transparent humanity”. Some questions come to mind. What was the reasoning behind Palantir’s decision to sponsor the Dimensions exhibition in Leipzig? What exactly were the role of art impresario Walter Smerling and the association Foundation for Art and Culture e.V. (Bonn) which he heads, after his efforts were stifled in Berlin? What role do art, curators and artists play in such an exhibition?
Who is Palantir?
Palantir is a company whose main business is the surveillance of individuals, and whose specialization lies in the merging of what should be separate data sets. Palantir’s products recently experienced setbacks in the German courts. The software HessenData has come under criticism for its multiple police database pooling that also has people indirectly linked to a case – say, members of a sports club – automatically checked. In Bavaria, too, the Palantir Gotham software used as a “cross-procedural search and analysis platform (Vera)” raises eyebrows.
Although classified as technically mature by the Fraunhofer Institute, constitutional concerns remain. As for Palantir’s Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning algorithms, there still remains a partial or complete lack of sufficient legal regulations for their use. All in all, Thomas Petri, the Bavarian State Data Protection Commissioner considers the manner in which Palantir’s data is merged “highly problematic”.
Palantir has been criticized in the past for its extensive cooperation with the Trump administration, which, among other things, designed and used the software to track underage migrants and their parents in the United States. The business model consisted in part not only of a crossing of ethical boundaries but also of the use of software under development, financed by government funds. It is therefore clear to see why the German market excites Palantir, namely as an opportunity to grab government funding.
Palantir’s company founder, Peter Thiel, has made a name for himself as a right-wing conservative billionaire who supports like-minded candidates in U.S. election campaigns. Among many other things, Thiel is a promoter of the highly problematic ideology of ‘longtermism’, a view that positions technology as value-neutral, thereby denying any human responsibility for the social impacts of this technology. This approach is well reflected in Thiels’ Palantir operation, and also in its choice to sponsor the Dimensions exhibition – more on this below.
This marks Leipzig as a bit of an odd choice. After all, the Stasi headquarters were stormed in Leipzig in 1989, and more recently, the initiative ‘Leipzig Camera’, for one, operating in the city for many years, targeting the sabotage of surveillance cameras in public spaces. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the opposition to surveillance, snooping and data aggregation is one of the main city’s legacies.
Palantir in Leipzig? Walter Smerling enters the stage.
“Leipzig is a very dynamic city, there is a lot of curiosity here. We are certain that the theme will be well received,” says art impresario Walter Smerling. We can’t help but recall that Smerling was also the name behind the problematic group exhibition Diversity United, whose patron, among others, was Vladimir Putin.
To deflect any criticism, unlike with ‘Diversity United’ Smerling chose to renounce state funding for the Leipzig show Dimensions. Instead, he secured Palantir and Deutsche Telekom, which has reportedly shown interest in cooperating with Palantir as sponsors. After visiting the exhibition, for the complete set up of a show conceptualized and imported from out of town, we estimate its budget at around 300,000 and 500,000 EUR. This kind of budget was sure to entice the Pittler-Werk show space. Leipzig’s cultural institutes and initiatives are known to be chronically strapped for cash. By comparison, in 2021 the city of Leipzig funded 37 independent art projects (i.e., projects not tied to institutions) with a total of 185,576 EUR. In other words, that was the total sum of funds allocated by the city for independent visual arts projects.
Meanwhile, the Berliner ice was getting thin for Smerling. In addition to the flack he took for the exhibition ‘Diversity United’, his attempted deal on the art center Kunsthalle Berlin had to be reversed after Berlin artists* called for a boycott of the project and the city of Berlin re-questioned their generous sponsoring. The reasons were the “System Smerling” (FAZ) with repeatedly unethical choice of sponsors within a close network between business, politics and art, as well as the appropriation and privatization of public space up to self-empowering foreign cultural policy, e.g. in China or Russia. No longer able to get his foot in Berlin’s door, Smerling now seems to be squeezing in via Leipzig. The means remain similar: art that pretends to participate in discourse and companies as sponsors that evade public scrutiny.
If, like Palantir, your hands appear dirty or at least your image seems tarnished, one redeeming way to attract public attention would be to sponsor an art exhibition. The principle, epitomized by the gas company Gazprom or the pharmaceutical company Sackler, is also known as ‘Art Washing’.
On the role of art
The title “Dimensions — Digital Art since 1859”, suggests an attempt to write an art history, if not one of digitality. What kind of narrative is supposed to unfold exactly, in the interplay of digital art within the halls of what was once Europe’s largest factory for machine manufacturing for gun barrels and munitions production?
Good question. The connection between military technology and contemporary digital art has been evident at least since the days of Paul Virilio and Harun Farocki, but it will not be commented on here. Whereas the show’s curator, Dr. Dan Xu, champions creativity and contextual competence, any attempts to find commentary on working conditions, surveillance mechanisms or discriminatory applications of technology in the context of digitality in ‘Dimensions’ are practically in vain.
A large part of the work ignores the social conditions of digitality whereas any data visualizations and installations are meant to pass as bold statements for their sheer monumentality. If a historiography of the digital is indeed supposed to take place here, then it clearly neglects the here and now. But regardless of any epoch, Dimensions’ notion of ‘the digital’ is a cipher for technology beyond any social cause and effect.
There is no mention of the atomizing of labor to optimisation employee-performance, as done by Amazon’s fulfillment centers, algorithm-run service providers like Uber, or any contemporary delivery service for that matter.
There is no talk of stock market speculation on a microscopic scale by means of computation beyond any democratic control.
There is no mention of the tedious labor of labeling hundreds of images every day by clickworkers who are themselves rendered into a cheap form of data for the AI to crunch, nor is mention of underpaid social media content moderators who filter out the worst pornography and violence at the expense of their own mental health.
Although these effects of the digital have been addressed by numerous artists, they are conspicuously absent in Dimensions. At most, there may have been a tentative coded reference to censorship in totalitarian China in one of the works… but that just might be an interpretation.
The show announces “spectacular art” on its homepage. Art as spectacle. This also seems to be the purpose of the Dimensions exhibition: a lavish eye-popping artwashing operation for the Palantir brand.
The final touch could have been a selfie station with data entry linked to Palantir’s Gotham monitoring software, or maybe the curators found it too on the nose. Instead, the sponsors, Palantir and Deutsche Telekom were given a substantive podium at the opening symposium.
It is no coincidence that Palantir is publishing a book at the same time entitled “From Artificial to Augmented Intelligence — What we can learn from art to shape the future with software”. In interviews with Palantir CEO Alex Karp, it also becomes clear that the exhibition participation goes beyond “art-washing”: Here, not only the own brand is to be placed in the positive light of art, but the concept of free art itself is to be appropriated in order to demand the greatest possible freedom without responsibility for the programmers of surveillance software as a “colony of artists” (Alex Karp).
In summary: The show Dimensions appears to be an attempt to distract the public from any political dimension of the digital by negotiating the history of the digital primarily as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, any questions about democratic control of surveillance technologies and the appropriation of data by corporations like Palantir may hopefully be evaded.
Our demands:
We demand a critical attitude towards exhibitions that engage in a depoliticized historiography.
We demand an open discussion and a rethinking with regard to sponsors—preferably not a co-opted discussion supervised by the sponsors themselves where they can control the setting to their liking.
We demand the development of ethical guidelines for the financing and promotion of art exhibitions in our city. These guidelines should first and foremost be discussed among Leipzig’s independent art spaces and institutes.
We demand stronger support of the independent scene by the city of Leipzig, with which, this kind of toxic sponsorship wouldn’t be needed in the first place."